King Buffalo’s Dan Reynolds - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 561

Hi, I'm Dan Reynolds from King Buffalo, here to talk about my bass rig I use live and studio and kind of wherever. Yes, so this is new-ish for me. I used Music Man basses for years until one was giving me trouble, and then we were on tour with a band called Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. Their bass player had a Sandberg, which is what this brand is. German company, you don't see them a lot around here, but it sounded real nice. He had sort of a J bass kind of copy. This is more of a kind of J bass slash Music Man copy. It's got the double humbuckers, which is sort of my go-to, but this one's a little more versatile than the standard Music Man. So basically it's active, can also be passive. If you pull the knob here, the volume difference is actually super minimal, which is nice. And then this is just your volume knob. In active mode and passive, I guess, this is the blend between the two pickups. Pretty simple. Then you got treble, bass. This switch here also changes these into single coil. Jazz picks up pickups essentially, so it just gives you a ton of options. Active, passive, humbucker, single coil, the preamp in there. It's got sort of a jazz bass style shape neck, plus that sort of jazz bassy pick guard and things like that. It's super light, super solid, super reliable, has a zero fret, which is weird. I didn't know it existed until I took it to my tech, and he was very excited about it. Apparently it helps with intonation a ton. Who knew? No, it's all stock. It's wonderful. It's perfect. They're not super pricey for anybody looking. They have a ton of different basses. They're super solid. They're hard to find. You can find them on Reverb and stuff. That's where I got it. They don't really sell them over here at all, but they're great alternatives to... I don't want to, like, poop on any of the other companies, but they're, you know, Music Man's gotten fairly expensive. They have some cheaper models, but these are very reasonable, offer a lot of sort of tonal options, which helps, especially live, to sort of scoop out some different EQ stuff for the different rooms and stuff that you're in. So I've been enjoying this a lot. Had about two years now, I think, and I've had zero problems with it so far. DR strings, kind of forever, both because they're great and they had my initials. They are the blues ones. They're like the nickel steel hybrids, so they have a little bit of snap to them while still not being super abrasive on your fingers. Standard size, what, 105 enough or whatever it is, and then we're C, drop C tuning, sometimes D standard most of the time. So I was talking about Music Man before. This one I bought when my Music Man Sterling neck went bad and I had to send it in for repair and that took forever, so I bought this one. This was one of their newer series. They're insanely cheap, 200 bucks, crazy. I'll plug it real quick because for that price this thing is, like, unbeatable, perhaps? It's wild. I did upgrade with a Seymour Duncan pickup here and new preamp, which I don't remember the name of, but 200 bucks for that. It sounds darn good. It's solid. I've never had to use it on the road, but it's your basic sort of stingray, cheap stingray version that they started making, like Fender makes their Squires and stuff like that. I think Music Man finally decided they needed to sell basses that weren't $2,500, so they started making a lot of ranges and these for the price is kind of unbelievable to be honest, but I haven't had to really use it. It looks nice. I don't, yeah, it's what, Sterling by Music Man, yeah, which is different than the Music Man Sterlings, which is the bass I had for years. It's very complicated and confusing, but the difference in price is about $2,200. So I guess I'll go through the chain here. Through the years I've tried to compact it as much as possible because less failure points is a dream. So tuner, just like Shawn, strobosom, Peterson, super solid, super precise. I don't know, it's the way to go as far as I'm concerned, and then we kind of have two sections of pedals here, kind of controlled by this Mosquito Blender pedal, which is always on, and basically kind of an effects loop slash parallel circuit. The one circuit is the Pork and Pickleway Huge Fuzz, which is my main fuzz, kind of set to be sort of synthy and warm. It goes directly into the wah, so I can get some really aggressive, heinous, arguably annoying fuzz wah, like cocked wah, really cutting through all the guitar and drum noise for songs like Firmament. And then that goes into this Fairfield Circuit gated fuzz, which I use every once in a while. But really it's these two that require this pedal, because when I'm messing around with the fuzz wah, I want to have that clean, low-end maintained underneath it, so not all of a sudden it's all missing. So that helps with that a lot. And then the remainder of these pedals are sort of going on behind and underneath that. We've got the MXR Bass Octave, pretty simple. And then the Harmonic Booster from Darkglass, which just gets a little more mid-harmonic. It's super important and helpful in live situations to make the bass discernible. Vintage Microtubes are also Darkglass. That's overdrive. It's a little dirty. So that's sort of all the gain structure. And then going into the Empress Bass Compressor, which I just got, which is great. I don't run it super aggressively. It just sort of cleans up again some of the wah and noisy fuzz effects to make it a little cleaner. Helps me to appear a little more professional. And then through the Boss MD-200, multi-effects, that's where my phasers, flangers, auto-wahs and stuff come from. I threw the DD-200 delay on. I don't use it for literally anything, but I recently had a Origin FX SVT sort of preamp pedal, which I don't need because of the new amp, which I'll talk about in a second. But I needed to fill the space, and this will give me some options to just play around with looping and wacky delays for maybe new record stuff. Who knows? New to me is this Quilter, and I guess new to a lot of people, I think, was released last year. Their new bass block, the V-803. I've been running sort of solid state, class D, very light, very small, very compact bass rigs for five or six years now, I think. Just for consistency, for laziness. I got sick of carrying around heavy bass rigs, and we've been trying our own sound guy. We got in-ears, so stage volume for ourselves has been less necessary, and they've gotten great, these little guys. So this has the setting I use, the Q-tube. It's supposed to, and seems to do a pretty good job of replicating a vintage-style tube amp. The gain, when it's set to that, does the tube gain break up pretty well and pretty accurately. I've used it four times now, so we'll see. But it does seem to sound pretty good through the Avatar 410. Plenty of volume while keeping stage volume low enough, which is helpful for sound guys, so they can do their thing for the crowd. That's it. Pretty simple. Finally is the Korg Minilogue XD, which I don't use any of the keys for because I have the, like Sean, the Keith McMillan 12-step, which is a MIDI controller, essentially. You can set these to literally anything you can. Generally speaking, it's a sort of C to C mimicking a keyboard, so you can play these, you can switch patches, you could set chords, which I have a couple of. And then the Minilogue is great because it does have a sequencer, which I use on a couple songs where playing the exact key pattern with my feet while playing bass would be problematic for me, so cheat a little bit, set up a nice sequence on here, trigger it, and go about my business. Yeah, again, Dan Reynolds from King Buffalo. We got some dates coming up June and July in Europe, and we have more to come.